One of my earliest childhood memories is of a tiny cottage that sat at the end of the road near our house. It wasn’t much to look at but I couldn’t wait to visit the neighbors who lived there just so I could get a drink of water from their magic well. I thought it was magic because the water was always on but it never ran out.
As you got close to cottage you would start to hear the sound of running water coming from the back yard. It flowed from a small curved pipe that served as a spigot standing in the middle of a crumbling square of cement. The water rushed out and drained through a metal grate and into a wide pipe in the ground, echoing off the sides as it met the waters deep below. The Pipe, the grate and even the cement were covered in rusty orange from the iron rich water. A thick glass beer mug hung from a wire hook on a wooden post nearby. I remember how hard it was to hold the mug up under the furiously flowing water at just the right angle to capture a cold drink on a hot day.
The water never stopped flowing even during the coldest part of the winter. It looked as though it had frozen in mid-air as ice reached from the mouth of the pipe to the ground, but you could still hear the sound of the water coming from the hollow center of the frozen flow. That was over fifty years ago and the last time I took a drive to the old subdivision it was still flowing just as it had when I was a little girl.
When I read about Jesus offering the woman at the well streams of living water I think about that old artesian well. What He offers is not a slow trickle but a never ending rushing flow so full of love and so powerful that we could never stand under the fullness of it. It has been there throughout all of the seasons of our lives waiting for us to reach for a drink of His refreshing grace and mercy and it will never run out, because He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
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